Norway’s unemployment rate on the ebb again

The Norwegian unemployment rate has been low compared to other Scandinavian and European countries, in particular since the mid-1990s. After the oil-price crash in 2013, the petroleum related industries experienced a huge reduction in demand for their products and services, which soon transmitted to the labour marked. Both the registered unemployment rate and the labour force survey rate increased in 2014 and 2015.

Modern economies seem to depend on broad based growth in GDP to stabilize unemployment rates, and strong growth to bring them down from high levels. An earlier post on Normetrics discussed the prospects of stronger growth in Mainland Norway GDP in 2017 and the following years with the aid of forecasts from the econometric model NAM (Norwegian Aggregate Model).

This post shows NAM forecasts for the unemployment rate, updated with new statistics about the unemployment rate in May.